Exotic Cats Slot: Introduction

Microgaming has been fairly quiet recently, putting out few new titles under its own banner and leaning more heavily on its classic back catalogue. Instead, the developer appears to have prioritised partnerships with smaller, lesser-known studios, which have produced a run of pretty poor slots. Given Microgaming’s iconic status, we still tend to get interested whenever a new release shows up, even if this one feels like a very lazy effort.

Exotic Cats is about as generic as a Microgaming slot can be, featuring 5 reels, 3 rows and 243 ways. It runs on all devices with stakes from €0.15 to €15 and offers a max win of €53,000 on max bet. As is often the case with Microgaming, RTP details are frustratingly difficult to track down, and we found no RTP information in either the help file or the paytable. Not ok!

It’s also not Microgaming’s first cat-themed game. Back in June 2016, Pretty Kitty launched, and it shares more than a few similarities with Exotic Cats.

Exotic Cats Slot: Symbols & Paytable

Exotic Cats features 6 low paying symbols and 5 high paying symbols, shown as cougars, leopards, panthers, tigers and lions—with the lion as the top regular symbol, paying a 10x win for 5 on a payline. There’s also a wild symbol worth 14,6x for 5 of a kind, plus a scatter symbol.

All 5 cats appear across the reel set. Any time a cat lands on its corresponding reel, the Expanding Symbols feature kicks in.

Expanding Symbols Feature

During both the base game and free spins, you can take advantage of expanding wild reels. When a cat lands on its matching reel while that reel is activated (when a cat appears at the top of the reel before the spin completes), it transforms into a wild and expands to fill the reel. This makes it possible to hit a full screen of wilds, which pays the maximum win of 3564 times the stake. Beyond that, there isn’t much else happening in the base game.

Exotic Cats Slot: Free Spins Feature

Hitting 3 or more scatter symbols anywhere on the reels triggers 10 free spins, and if you land another 3 or more scatters during the free spins round, you’ll receive an extra 5 spins. The free spins mode plays the same as the main game in terms of mechanics and features, but it uses a different reel set with more premium symbols.

Exotic Cats Slot: Conclusion

This is a straightforward, standard Microgaming slot with relatively low payouts and medium volatility, though it can still deliver some very nice hits. It’s certainly not the worst title we’ve played, but it can start to feel repetitive, especially since the free spins round is so similar to the base game. In our view, even something as simple as adding a multiplier to free spins would have been a major upgrade, along with a random feature in the main game.

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